Comment by karthikm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by karthikm | Hacker News Reader

There is no reason for not knowing something. That being said, knowing Java at this point might be advantageous in many respects because of the mature state of third party libraries available to support all aspects (development, testing, deployment) of any kind of work you are into.

If you are a good programmer without a job, it will definitely help you as there are plenty of Java jobs available in the market now.

I have personally come across a couple of startups, started by smart engineers from MIT/Stanford, which suffered because they found excuses not to do their work in Java and do it in Ruby/PHP. One of them ended up rewriting everything in Java (which made their initial 6 months of development a throwaway) and sadly, another one got stalled. Am not implying that its better than other languages as each language has its own pros and cons. However, you will not know if it can serve your specific purpose better because you don't know what you don't know.

Well, there is opportunity cost. Could the time and effort spent on Java be better spent elsewhere?

It may be because I'm still feeling the glow Java had when I learnt it in the late 1990's, but I really like a lot of things about it. It's a very simple, safe and easy to use language, it's C++ without the broken glass, it's C with automatic memory allocation, bounds checking and a nicer package/interface system. API's are separated and enforced. It used to be bemoaned as slow ("knock knock" "who's there" "................java"), and now it's seen as fast. That's pretty cool (it's partly because it's relatively faster than python... but it also has been made actually faster).

Many early adopters left it for python/ruby a few years ago when the small language that Java was became uglier with extensions, esp generics and annotations. Perhaps an important reason people left is because it became successful, and it became associated with unpleasant mindless corporate programming.

If you care at all about what qualities a language needs to have in order to be wildly adopted, Java has something to teach. Some people say it was just Sun's marketing... but Sun marketed it as a web language (applets), and it never took off there.

Well, there is opportunity cost

That's the succinct version of my first thought: "Because one was too busy making something instead of learning languages for their own sake."

The opportunity cost of learning Java (or any programming language/paradigm for that matter) is very low compared to cost of failure (in the instance i've quoted). Your thoughts on what's good in Java is well put. I don't know if generics/annotations made the language uglier but I can definitely vouch that it has made my life a lot more easier to write programs faster. Has it made my programs faster? - maybe or maybe not :)

Java is the new C.

PHP might not be the best choice for every job, but do Java developers really have more resources? Google says...

java+libraries: 13,600,000 results

php+libraries: 32,200,000 results

Java having lots of jobs isnt a good metric, because theres lots of jobs also means theres lots of people applying, in fact I would say a good reason to not use Java would be to simply weed away (some) people applying

From an excuse point of view, its definitely a metric for a 'good' programmer 'without' a job.

I would highly recommend against selecting a technology because you want to weed out applicants who are misfits. A better option would be to have a strong hiring process.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com